Question: A User deleted a complety directory. How get it back from the backup?

The user moved lots of his mails from the INBOX to another XXX Folder. After this job, he deleted the Folder XXX. The Folder is not in the recycler.

On my nightly backup i have the complete mails in the INBOX Folder.

now, how can i recover the old mails from the INBOX to another Folder ABC.

I tryed to move the INBOX Folder (/opt/kerio/mailserver/store/mail/domain.com/user/INBOX/) to /opt/kerio/mailserver/store/mail/domain.com/user/New Folder/ but nothing happend Must i restart the Server first? I only copy it without a Server restart.

I am a little confused about your backup process? Are you using the built-in Kerio backup utility to create your nightly backups? Or are you using a third party backup solution?

If you are using the built-in Kerio backup, then you will need to decompress the zip file(s) created until you come across the directory. Copy the messages and move them over to the users mailstore directory. You will place these files into the msgs folder of the chosen directory.

If you are using a third party backup, you will do the same (I do not know if the backup is compressed or not).

After you have moved the files over to the user's directory, you will need to re-index the folder. Do this by navigating to the directory, in it locate the index.fld file and rename it to index.bad which will force Kerio to rebuild the index file listing all of the contents contained in the msgs folder of that directory. Be sure that you have the user logged out of their account while you perform this restore. You may need to make sure that you have correct permissions set for the items you moved over.

If the user simply deleted the folder and or any message contained within it, you may be able to go to their account using the Kerio Administration console and recover deleted items. But this will only work if the user deleted the folder and you have the option enabled to allow deleted items recovery in the domain setup.

- export of folder in a single file (mbox format), with also the subfolders if you want;
- export of all messages in single files (eml format);
- export of all messages in single files (html or plain text format), with an index;
- export of all messages in one single plain text file;
- export of index of the messages in a folder (HTML or CSV format); - mbox files import;
- eml files import;
- import of all the eml files existing in a directory;

I just went through this process today and have a big problem. I had a user accidentally delete thousands of messages. Here was my process:

1) Un-zip the full backup that I wanted to restore this user from
2) Shut down Kerio
3) Moved the bad user account out of the Kerio store folder for that domain.
4) Copied in the good (backup) user account folder to that location.
5) Deleted ALL the index.fld in the good (backup) account folder and subfolders
6) rebooted and restarted Kerio

The good news is, all the mail is there for that user (as of the full back-up time).

The bad news is every single mail message looks like it arrived at the time the back-up zip file was created. Not good. What made it worse is his iPhone with ActiveSync is now trying to sync 4 GB of messages since they are within the "3 day" window that ActiveSync looks back and gets.

Is there a way to restore a single users account folders without loosing all the mail sent dates??

When the files are unpacked from the archive or copied/moved, it is important to preserve creation and modification timestamps of the files. make sure you're using correct unpacker which can ensure that.

Also, removing index.fld file makes it much worse. Do not delete any file in the message store until our technical support gives you advice to do so. To force folder re-index (which is not a general solution for any problem) rename the index.fld file to index.bad.

To force folder re-index (which is not a general solution for any problem) rename the index.fld file to index.bad.

If the contents of the folder have changed, this doesn't always pick up mail that isn't in the index.bad file, or continues to pick up mail that isn't there because it's in the index.bad. I've run into situations where I did a re-index this way and it didn't solve the problem. I always try it first, but it doesn't always work.

When the files are unpacked from the archive or copied/moved, it is important to preserve creation and modification timestamps of the files. make sure you're using correct unpacker which can ensure that.

Also, removing index.fld file makes it much worse. Do not delete any file in the message store until our technical support gives you advice to do so. To force folder re-index (which is not a general solution for any problem) rename the index.fld file to index.bad.

I am using the built-in unpacker with OS X 10.4 I am unzipping in the GUI since I have to re-arrange some folders after they unzip.

This time, I had the 4 zipped files of my full-backup on the same drive as Kerio. I un-zipped all 4, combined them so the account I was needing to restore was all together and then via command line, used the "cp -r" command to move the root of the user from the back-up location to the correct location in Kerio. This was done with the server off. I then re-booted. All the dates are still today's date.

What is a better procedure for this?? The problem is when I un-zip the backups created by Kerio, this users folders span 3 of those back-ups (since his account is over 4 Gb of data).

hi everyone just to let you know this worked perfectly when i had to recover a users calendar

i renamed the index.fld to index.bad and just restarted the server

in a side note, would anyone know why although the server emails me everyday to tell me its backed up succesffuly

i didnt actually have backup files for friday AM, Saturday AM and Sunday AM, the last file i had was my thursday backup which was my weekly full backup and i did have monday AM's incremental (at which point too late )

does anyone have any thoughts or reccomendations - i currently backup onto an external firewire device hooked up to my xserve

Have you tried the ditto command. This is useful if you have to merge files rather than replace.

<_a.t_>Hugo
this is from the Kerio Manual. It is an example of restoring one user folder. I think this will overwrite the folder, so I would locally store any mail that has come in since the backup and then do this. Then import them back in with your email client.

If there are special circumstances where the above would work better. For example, I needed to merge some emails from the back up with the existing store.

* The directory with the backup is stored on an external disk,
*one specific folder of the user mailbox must be gained from the backup (Sent Items in this case),
*the command is run in the verbose mode (parameter -v) which allows to monitor the recovery process.

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